The Mavizen TTX02 has been introduced, based on the technology of the racer that won the first TTXGP. For £25,000 ($41,500), you can buy an electric racer, ready to run. Top speed, depending on gearing, is as much as 130 mph. A grid filled with similar bikes could make for a very interesting race.
When you begin to read the technical specs it’s hard not to quickly notice the cited range, the bike delivered at the $41K price goes 25 miles at track speeds or 38 to 60 miles under hard to gentle road use. A more expensive battery pack extends that to 40 miles on the track or 75 to 130 miles on the road.
Performance looks good, range is still limited, but we’ll likely be seeing more of these very soon.
Press release and video below:
Mavizen TTX02 will be available for delivery in Q1/2010 with a limited production of 50 units. Target price for complete bike with a Circuit Pack is £25,000. This will be a complete platform to take part in any national or FIM championship. To place your deposit and discuss options, please log onto www.mavizen.com
Mavizen TTX02 : Technical specification
Top speed:
130+ mph 70kw peak, 40kw continuous. Speed is dependent on gearing.
Engine management:
Fully web enabled open source system with a USB based system bus.
Range:
25-50 miles under track conditions; 50-130 miles under regular road use, dependent upon batter pack selected.
Pack options:
(i) Circuit Pack: 6kw/h, 25 miles track use, 38/60 miles hard/gentle road use
(ii) Snaefell Pack: 11kw/h pack, 40 miles road racing, 75/130 miles hard/gentle road use, hot swappable power packs
(iii) Sprint Pack TBA. 3kw/h, 6 miles track use.
System OS :
Linux (have also tested against Windows and may look into Android)
Chassis: `
Homologated with Brembo brakes and suspension from WP
Dry weight:
110kg. With Circuit Pack 160kg.
Drive train:
Interchangeable capacity is dependent on the pack selected during purchase.
Link: Mavizen
dave432 says
These bikes would be ideal for downtown street course racing events as high revving engine noise would be eliminated. Still a way to go until the average Joe can afford it.
Good to see progress being made with the battery life regardless of the fear-mongering naysayers.
Laurent says
Nice, but wayyy too expensive.
You can build something very similar for less than 10k and probably half that if you can find a cheap donor bike.
The Aprilia RS 125 is already a “classic” chassi for conversions.
Best
Richard Gozinya says
Always great to see someone pushing the technology, and I’ve heard about some interesting things in development in regards to batteries, like with metal air, ten times the energy capacity of the lithium ones. Eventually electric vehicles will be mainstream, not there yet obviously, but that’s no reason for people to stop pushing the boundaries.
kneeslider says
I just removed several comments on this post because the writers missed the instruction above that says: “Comments should be closely related to post content.” This post is not about global warming/cooling or politics on a wider scale. STAY ON TOPIC.
Thanks,
Paul
Woodman West says
Got it, sorry passion can run high.
Joe says
Its really cool to see electric technology moving forward on so many fronts. Electric motors are superior in so many ways, so once they get the battery thing sorted out, I can see the internal combustion engine going the way of the steam engine. The only thing I wonder is what they’re gonna do about jet engines. electric turboprops? Seems doubtful.
cycleguy says
It’s quite possible that we’ll ultimately end up with an energy storage device that does not necessarily rely on a chemical reaction such as current batteries do to store and release energy. There is a lot going on right now in the super-capacitor field. These and other breakthrough’s will ultimately lead to much higher storage capacities and the ability to recharge is less than 5 – 10 minutes. This will be the breakthrough EV’s are waiting for and it looks like we are rapidly moving towards that goal.
MikeC says
I am very encouraged that someone (many actually) is coming forward with something relatively competitive in the sportbike field, and electric. I am a huge advocate for this technology development as it will bring forward new areas of thought, and innovation. Remember that it took the ICE 50+ years to make decent net power AND be reasonably affordable, and another 50+ to make relatively efficient (still very poor compared to electric) use of the energy potential available. Give the electric scene that much time and more importantly, money, and things could be real interesting. Further innovation will also deal with any environmental issues currently on the table as well.
John McDowell says
I have been around 55 years, and this “electric” motorcycle race is awsome. To see the inventiveness, and compassion going into these various race bikes, is just great. Obviously, some little details need to be tweaked, but with competition, both professional and amateur,
many chances for greatness are out there. Ford, Mercedes, Ferrari, Honda ,someday there will be another standout.
Azzy says
MikeC, O do not think that the time frame would be the same. Given that the world economies can support development at the rate that has occurred since the 1980’s, it should be at most 10 years before the electric bike’s power source and drive train is easily adaptable as a standard offering at what we know to be standard pricing.
James Bowman says
It seems that only energy density and cost holds back electrics from making serious in roads and battery and ultra capacitor technology is being developed on many fronts. The cost of electric motors I would think should be 1/2 or less of an ICE engine as the complexity is minimal. As Laurent said already I think the small Aprilla’s are begging for such treatment. Along a different line I have considered that if I could get some Aprilla RS 50cc chassis and install the Aixro 294cc wankel engine into them what nifty little track bikes those would be. Funds do not permit :o(
I don’t think the days of electrics are far off we will see.
Sean says
The thing that concerns me is that, if you pack a similar amount
of energy into a battery to that available from a tank of gasoline,
you have created what is commonly called a ‘bomb’. That is what
makes all of these battery or ultracapacitor ideas ultimately a dead
end. Fuel cells have potential, though.
Byrd says
Although I will really miss the sound and feel of a Harley some day, the notion of a motor that pulls from 60 to 80 just as hard as it pulls from 20 to 30 would be way fun to ride. I just worry about people in cars running bikes off the road because they can’t hear them.
Byrd says
Sean, how is a battery any more of a “bomb” than a gas tank? Bother are storing potential energy. One is a whole lot more volitile than the other. I’ve seen a few cars burn to the ground. The battery exploding is NOTHING compared to the fuel tank. What am I missing here?
GenWaylaid says
Interesting. If they made a street-legal version with the largest battery pack they’d have the motorcycle equivalent of the Tesla Roadster: good performance, just enough range to be practical, steep price. The next generation of batteries / ultracaps (or more likely a combination of the two) should allow truly mainstream electric bikes, but who knows when that will come along?
kim says
Even if it’ll be a while before electric motorcycles become price-competitive with their gas powered brethren, maybe one could get used to this part of life becoming more expensive. After all, those of us old enough for it got used to higher energy prices after the 1973 OPEC oil embargo. So many other thing in life have become significantly cheaper – clothes, electronic goods, to mention but two – so in many ways it is down to choice whether we will buy an electric motorcycle.
cycleguy says
One major advantage of electrics that hasn’t been brought up yet, is the ability of small manufacturers to compete. Electrics even the playing field. The major reason large manufacturers have an upper hand on the market is their ability to design, manufacture, test and develop the internal combustion engine, any small manufacturer that wanted to break into this segment would require huge capitol investments as well as talented staffs.
All this is eliminated by simply purchasing an existing motor from a multitudes of manufacturers that have been building motors for years. Some performance gains can be gained through liquid cooling and lighter weight materials, but the difference in the final product would be minimal. Batteries also even the field. There is no motorcycle manufacturer that makes batteries, battery technology is in the hands of the battery companies not the motorcycle manufacturers. This allows the small volume guy’s to purchase the same batteries as the big boys.
Electric vehicles seem ideal for the small volume manufacturers. This would allow American manufacturers to get involved without the old arguments and stigma’s of V-Twins vs. I-4’s.
Al says
Byrd,
I agree with Sean. There is a huge difference in the safety of gasoline tanks and large high energy batteries/ultracaps for mobile use.
Gas tanks are designed to deform, they are made of very malleble mild steel, strong and yet they can yield a lot without leaking. They are much smaller than a power pack of batts will ever be for the forseeable future and can be placed away from impact zones of the vehicle. Gas in a tank has no oxidizer (O2) available in any meaningful quantity needed for combustion. The modern gas tank can take a significant impact safely, happens every day.
By comparison a high energy batt/cap needs only a small internal short to start a fire/chain reaction, as the separation between + and – charge becomes thinner as power density goes up. This can happen as a result of normal use/heat cycles/recharging, not even counting the 5 or 6 g safety factor common for vehicle design. Crush zones for large batts become a real problem, not much useable space left for a given vehicle size with any useful range.
In my experience, caps are even worse. The big ones I’ve used have vents that you “aim” in a safe direction by design. They do not take well to being impacted or bent! And when they go off, you don’t want to be anywhere close by! They can kill you if you get shorted across them because they can discharge very fast. I touch/service tanks on my bikes all the time and they won’t kill me. Servicing large caps is a very serious deal not to be taken lightly!
Since the hazard of these new technologies is high vs. gas tanks, the designers must be very diligent in dealing with the issues of impact, shock loading & packaging since the batteries become the single largest system element of the design. They have quite a ways to go vs gas tanks. I used to engineer this stuff, and learned some of these lessons the hard way. Hybrid batts are the most protected part of those vehicles, for example.
The other issue that is important is where does all the electricity come from to recharge millions of new vehicles? I think that is where the green issue stuff came from and it is not trivial impact. Wiki “US total energy consumption.” The units are Quads: quadrillion Btu’s!
Byrd says
Thanks for the info Al, I had no idea this was even an issue. Regarding a source for the electricity, the only answer that seems to make sense to me, is solar panels. There could be private solar panels, but also conceivably re-charging station which had large arrays, or maybe even their own grid run by solar. Seems like if people just started going in the direction, market demand would create the infrastructure either incrementally, or through public works.
I did know about filter caps btw. I worked on an electronics assembly line when I was 20, and we used to charge up filter caps and toss them to the newbies.
bkowal says
It’s a new era when spec sheets state the operating system for your motorcycle.
It’s really tough to beat the energy density and other practical aspects of gasoline. Gasoline gives us as much cheap power as we want for our motorcycle, with minimal transportation, storage and packaging requirements. Gasoline doesn’t care how fast you burn it, what the temperature is outside, or how fast you refill your tank.
The energy density of gas (46.4MJ/kg) is about 100x that of a good lithium-ion battery (0.46MJ/kg). Batteries may never reach that performance level of gas. No I don’t work for Exxon, I just want to people to understand the practical realities of competing with our ICE bikes; We have a long way to go.
Al says
Byrd,
Let’s take a look at what a solar solution for transport might require. This is a calc that every technical high school student should have to do and ponder its consequence. I will calc for the US transportation sector to give a sense of the magnitude of the challange, as it is beyond comprehension for the layman. Maybe you could do a calc for the motorcycle/scooter industry. Big things start from little things, but the seed has to be in the right place at the right time!
From US Energy Trends for 2002:
Total energy used in the USA for transport: 26.5 Quads (A quad is a quadrillion BTU’s!)
Useful energy used: 5.3 Q (that’s like the shaft horsepower delivered, the rest is waste as heat)
For near-term future, assume we will need at least the 5.3 Q useful. Any system has losses. For batts, its recharge losses, transmission & leakage losses. Hence, use about 10 Q for power input to run USA transportation electrically.
1 Quad = 293 MILLION Megawatt-hours! (That is a hell of a lot of power!)
SEGS is the world’s largest solar power generation facility in the Mojave. It covers 1,600 acres, and is in the most prime site in the 48 states for solar flux. Its average output is 75 Megawatts.
Assume ALL the solar power generated goes to recharge transportation.
75 MW x 24 hrs x 365 days = 657,000. Megawatt-hours annually from a SEGS facility. I will not deduct for losses for storage/charging transport at night to keep things simple.
10 Quads for transport = 2,930,000,000. Megawatt-hours.
Let’s round that to 3 BILLION Megawatt-hours, annually for USA transport. This is an immense amount of power vs. our little world of motorcycles.
It would take 4566 of the world’s largest thermal solar power plants to generate that load for transport. It would cover over 7 million acres of land (over 11,000 square miles), but would in reality be much larger as most places don’t have the solar equivalent of Mojave desert. Also, this is for thermal solar generation, not photovoltaics (PV.) PV numbers would be even larger.
This is just a peek at our energy use. Most of us have never taken a look at how much energy gets consumed. It is staggering. And this is just transport. Nonetheless, great things start from small things, like the giant redwoods. But those take time to grow.
Electric bikes will sprout, grow and show a path forward, and if batts just get 2 or 3 times better, they will become much more practical for many. They will be a tiny fraction of the transport fuel solution we need, but certainly the most fun part! I can’t wait to ride a really good one (I know the owner of one of the best in development!)
David/cigarrz says
The US military is very interested in high density energy sources for all sorts of portable energy weapons as well as human assist suits. If there are breakthrough’s to be found they will probably be the funding source and the first to find out what the upper limits realistically are and how far we are from implementing them. Every time you convert an energy to another form you lose energy including storing electricity in chemical form in a battery until the laws of physics are changed the direct use of the energy source will still be more efficient. However I would love to be the guy that invents the fusion reactor in the 10lb box
Al says
Those numbers were so depressing I had to do a bottoms-up calc for bikes.
Extending the specs from this article, we can expect to consume about 15 KWh per 100 miles on a bike. For simplicity, 2x that for charging. For 10,000. miles annual riding that’s 3000 KWh, a reasonable number. At my current electric rate, that’s $322. annually for “gas” equivalent, not bad at all.
Amortization of batteries would cost more than this, but that is for another story.
Mule says
I just had a sobering thought 🙁 The best conductor of electricity other than the human body is gold. So the ultimate competition bikes as well as being made light with carbon, etc, will have gold wiring further driving the prices up for Privateers!
Al says
Just wait until we have superconductor e-bikes. Single-track vacuum bottle bikes. Top off the liquid N2, charge it up.
It will be like getting shot off an aircraft carrier or launched from a rail gun!
steve says
I wonder how ktm feels about this company using the RC8 as the platform for their motorcycle? Considering the time and money that went into developing the RC8, and the fact that ktm has already announced plans to introduce an electric dirtbike – signifying their interest in electric motorcycles in general – i wonder how they feel about this whole thing….
Mule says
Steve, they are probably envious that they didn’t use their own bike to do it first.
Al, the downside of a Rail gun is that it takes a bus-load of battery storage all piled up to fire it once! Maybe for drag racing. Charge and shoot!